Features

• Supply chain management in Australia - Part 3

  By David Braue | 21 September, 2011 07:00

  As if data quality and stockouts weren’t enough of a day-today worry for CIOs, added pressure to serve demanding online customers and keep up with changing legislation are creating new challenges. With several retail giants lumbering online and the looming introduction of the government’s new carbon tax, CIOs need to be working with procurement, financial and other business leaders to ensure supply-chain systems are up to today’s new challenges.

• Supply chain management in Australia - Part 2

  By David Braue | 20 September, 2011 06:00

  If supply chain experts can spend so much time and effort improving efficiency and still have more work to do, how are smaller companies meant to get their supply chains right? It’s not as if they have been standing still: CIOs at FMCG organisations and other companies of all sizes have long focused on using high-end supply chain management solutions to trim fat from their company supply chains. Many embarked upon massive enterprise resource planning (ERP) implementations a decade ago as they stared down the end-of-life of existing systems and the spectre of the Y2K bug. Yet while their intentions were good, the same can’t be said for the methods of resolution.

• Supply chain management in Australia - Part 1

  By David Braue | 19 September, 2011 10:59

  It all started, as these things sometimes do, with a chicken.

• Your workplace in 2020: Gartner's predictions

  By Thomas Wailgum | 05 August, 2010 02:23

  How will people work 10 years from now? Gartner thinks it has a pretty good idea, predicting 10 major changes that will occur during the next 10 years.

• An IT department's crucial role in a new product launch

  By Kim S. Nash | 22 July, 2010 07:01

  In late 2008, Monsanto licensed a seed coating that helps corn, soybean and other seeds fight insects and disease during the tricky germination stage. By early 2009, company scientists had finished work on that cocktail of fungicides and insecticides, dubbed Acceleron, and the company wanted to get the coating to market in time for the 2010 planting season. "We were going after that opportunity very aggressively. If we don't hit season, that opportunity is another 12 months away," says CIO Shirley Cunningham.

• Supply Chains Are Bigger Today, But Are They Better?

  By Thomas Wailgum | 19 January, 2010 09:15

  As a core competency for businesses, "supply chain automation" seems like a management directive from the bygone eras of "knowledge management" and "reengineering." It harkens to the days of sending and receiving handwritten orders via fax, to lacking a thorough understanding of the true identities of the suppliers that exist in companies' downstream chains.

• Ego Pharmaceuticals ups inventory management, supply chain with SAP

  By CIO Staff | 11 August, 2009 11:32

  Ego Pharmaceuticals is expecting to increase its production and supply capacity through a new rollout of SAP’s Business All-in-One software.

• Wal-Mart orders suppliers to go green, some see red

  By Thomas Wailgum | 21 July, 2009 03:05

  A famous superhero once noted, with trepidation: "With great power comes great responsibility." Retail juggernaut Wal-Mart, with US$401 billion in worldwide sales, has always wielded the "great power" part with its suppliers.

• Enterprise software licensing negotiations: tips

  By Thomas Wailgum | 09 July, 2009 05:03

  For any business today, purchasing enterprise software -- ERP, CRM, BI and supply chain -- apps is probably unlike any other corporate activity.

• Supply chain reality: risk tied to smaller pool of suppliers

  By Thomas Wailgum | 02 June, 2009 05:16

  Without question, today's supply chain applications can provide unmatched visibility into a company's supplier base, help spot inefficiencies and allow for better, smarter decision-making on logistics and inventory.

• Backshoring: Just PR, or Long-Term Business Strategy?

  By Pam Baker | 28 May, 2009 07:59

  Some economists are recommending that U.S.-based companies that have sent work overseas bring it back to the U.S. They advocate for "on-shoring" or "backshoring" - not as a protectionist trade policy-but as a strategic move designed to conserve a market (namely, U.S. consumers.)

• Wal-Mart Aims To Go Green With Global Supply Chain Makeover

  By Thomas Wailgum | 28 October, 2008 14:18

  Wal-Mart has demanded that its Chinese suppliers adhere to green, environmentally friendly and product safety standards. But experts say that ensuring compliance in the complicated, vast network of Asian suppliers will be nearly impossible.

• CIOs to Map the Supply Chain of the Future

  By Mark Chillingworth | 20 October, 2008 11:44

  Data loads will shape the truck loads of the tomorrow.

• What You Should Do About Tainted Goods from China and Other Global Supply Chain Risks

  By Katherine Walsh | 25 September, 2008 09:50

  The US government warnings about tainted imports from China are ominous and ongoing. In July 2007 poisonous chemicals were found in toothpaste. This was just a month after imports of farm-raised Chinese seafood and lead paint in Thomas the Tank Engine toy trains were detained. And May had seen contaminated pet foods sicken and kill thousand of US cats and dogs. Now its humans, when earlier this month every parents' nightmare became a reality: Melamine contaminated infant formula poisoned more than 50,000 Chinese infants and resulted in at least four deaths.